PARIS IN RAIN

                                                       

RAIN IN PARIS 

 Rain in Paris is not weather but ontology. The city, so devoted to appearance :  its facades, its fashion, its careful cafés arranged like stage sets,  suddenly loses its certainty under water. Balconies weep onto awnings, and the Seine River  ceases to reflect monuments and instead dissolves them, turning Notre-Dame into a trembling smear of gray, and the Tower’s lattice into a half-erased theorem by the second level, as if geometry itself were provisional. Along the promenades, the plane trees stand unmoved, their bark mottled like old frescoes, shedding wet leaves that stick to the walk like signatures the rain refuses to dry. Higher up, the rain washes Montmartre hill clean, stone steps slick and shining, Sacré-Cœur bleached pale as bone against a sky that has forgotten how to be blue. The Pont Neuf  forgets whether it is bridge or mirage. Tourists gather under the Champ de Mars with plastic ponchos the colour of lost tickets, consulting maps that bleed ink, learning that the  city will not pose for them today. They queue instead at the Louvre and the Orsay, trading the drowned horizon for guarded canvases, where rain is painted but never felt, where Mona Lisa smiles through glass while the real world smudges.

 Cobblestones on paths become mirrors, and every passerby inherits two selves: the upright figure hurrying under an umbrella, and the liquid double that follows at their feet, distorted, fugitive. Bookstalls along the quai draw their green shutters like eyelids against the wet. This is why Parisians love the rain and resent it also: it exposes the city’s great secret, that permanence is a conceit. Haussmann’s boulevards, meant to impose rational order, grow porous; the city reverts to flux. Yet in that dissolution there is a strange honesty. The rain strips Paris of its postcard, and what remains is not less beautiful but more human : the smell of wet chestnut trees in the Luxembourg, the hiss of tires on Boulevard Saint-Germain, a baker sliding baguettes into paper as steam meets drizzle, a couple kissing in a doorway because the world has briefly agreed to blur. Café de Flore holds its glow against the gray, arguments about Sartre rising with the cigarette smoke, proving that ideas, like coffee, need steam to rise.Immanuel  Kant would call it the sublime: beauty tinged with a mild terror of the formless. But Albert Camus would recognise something else: the Absurd. Here is a city that insists on meaning , on history, on art, on liberté, and here is the rain, indifferent, undoing it all without malice. The Parisian, caught between an awning and a downpour, does not despair. He lights a cigarette, adjusts his scarf, and keeps walking under a sky that has stolen the skyline, past the plane trees that have seen empires rust and still root themselves in the wet, past the tourists who came for permanence and found only reflection, past the museums where pigment waits for dry eyes to return. That gesture, futile and dignified, is Camus’s revolt in miniature: to live as if the blur were a canvas, even knowing the water will take it. In rain, Paris stops performing and simply exists, and in doing so, reminds us that to exist is always, a little, to be undone , and to go on anyway.

When Paris loses its monuments to rain and mist, it gets them back as reflections. Beauty and meaning aren’t erased ,  they’re translated. From stone to water, from skyline to street, from eternal to ephemeral. The  trees keep their slow patience on the promenades, and Montmartre, washed and glistening, keeps its vigil above the blur, until the clouds lift and the Eiffel Tower returns, line by line, from mist to iron again, standing as if it had never doubted itself, while the tourists, damp and laughing, fold their maps and decide the detour was the destination, and the museums exhale their crowds back into a city that has remembered how to shine.

( Avtar Mota)

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